A Tour Inside Syria's Insurgency

Smuggled by anti-regime fighters across the Lebanon border and into the heart of the uprising, I found fearless protesters, calls for intervention, and the growing threat of civil war

Still image taken from video shows purported members of "Free Syrian Army" firing at a convoy of government security buses in the village of Dael / Reuters

Qutaiba, a 22-year-old engineering
student, had never been arrested before Syrian security forces detained
him at a checkpoint in a suburb of Damascus and dragged him to a
military base. At the time, he didn't know if he would survive:
activists like him were disappearing, sometimes turning up later as
mutilated corpses. But he did survive, and what he went through would
later lead him to me.

When Qutaiba arrived at the military base,
at first he was left to stand outside, hooded, hands cuffed behind his
back. It seemed as if everyone walking past gave him a kick, a punch, or
a blow from a rifle butt. After maybe 15 minutes, he was taken to see
the officer in charge, a colonel. The hood was removed, though not the
handcuffs.

The colonel, looking the prisoner up and down, asked, "Who hit this guy?"

"It was Abdullah," one of the guards answered.

The colonel shouted for Abdullah, who quickly arrived.

"You motherfucker," the colonel spat at the soldier. "If I've told you
once, I've told you a hundred times: No one. Should touch. Any.
Citizen."

On the word "citizen" the colonel's hand flew out and
smacked Qutaiba on the side of the head. The blow sent him crashing to
the ground, looking at their boots. The officer had struck him "with
the flat of his hand, but it was a strong one," he later remembered. The
colonel remained silent. The guards and Abdullah laughed uproariously.

Then
he was taken away to be beaten and tortured over a period of weeks. It
was not sophisticated or inventive. Electric shocks while he lay on the
floor in a pool of water. Endless kicks and punches that would leave
his guards exhausted at the end of each flurry. For the first five days,
they didn't even ask any questions. That came later, the initial
pummelling just to soften him up.

Always, he tried to remain
standing. "When you are on the ground, they will hit you more," he said.
"They were doing Debke on my body," he told me, naming the Arabic folk
dance that means literally "stamping of the feet." He laughed at that,
and good-naturedly, and as he remembered each taunt from the guards.
"This is for Facebook." Smack. "This is for Twitter." Punch. "This is
for CNN, for the BBC, for Al Jazeera." A drumming of feet. "Look, we've
caught the leader of the Syrian revolution."

"As soon as the buses stopped, they got out and
started shooting. There wasn't a single shot in the
air."

I met Qutaiba in an upmarket coffee shop in
Beirut, where he had fled to after being released. At the next table,
men wearing leather jackets and Rolexes were puffing on fat cigars.
Stylish, well-dressed 20-something women greeted one another with air
kisses. Six-foot-two, handsome, relaxed, and smiling throughout his
story, Qutaiba didn't look at all out of place.

He had been
picked up by the feared Air Force Intelligence, al-Mukhabarat
al-Jawiyya. Syrian activists talk a lot about Air Force Intelligence.
Hafez al-Assad, the former president and father of Bashar al-Assad, had
commanded the air force, making its security arm one of the most
powerful of Syria's dozen or so secret police organizations. They were
brutal but incompetent, Qutaiba said. They fumbled so long over logging
in to his Facebook account that by the time they did another activist
had managed to get in to delete everything. They couldn't open the flash
memory card full of opposition literature and videos, he laughed.

The
only time he did not break into his story with an easy smile was when
he came to how he had been caught. It was an informer, a "rat.," he
believes. His suburb of Damascus had many of them, he said, who often
conducted their business in the open, because they were so sure of the
regime's protection. "They are proud that they are doing this ... every
month, there is a crackdown. They are the people who are preparing the
lists."

The "rats" were the biggest threat to the revolution,
he believed, which was why he had come to Lebanon to buy silencers for
pistols to use against suspected loyalists. "We got to a situation where
either we kill them or we really hurt them to send out a message."

Qutaiba
had started out in April as a peaceful protester and had continued that
way for many months. His personal trajectory is in some ways like that
of Syria's revolution and of Syria itself. The struggle with the
government is becoming increasingly militarized; there is a small but
growing insurgency.

Many inside and outside Syria worry it may
end in a civil war, perhaps a sectarian conflict pitting majority Sunnis
against the Alawites, a minority that includes the Assads, and their
Shiite and Christian allies. Qutaiba is a practicing Sunni but he told
me that the Syria he wanted, the Syria he was fighting for, would be
democratic, free and pluralist. During one week in late November of
travelling covertly inside Syria, meeting protesters, opposition
activists, and fighters, I heard the same thing over and over. But
people know what to say to outsiders. Sometimes, what they said to each
other was different.

We -- a BBC cameraman Fred Scott and I --
entered Syria the same way that Qutaiba's pistol silencers were going
in, smuggled over the border from Lebanon. The men we joined were not
professional smugglers but activists who were supporting the Syrian Free
Army, an informal network of defected government soldiers. They were
taking in medicines and weapons and bringing out the wounded, an
underground railway working in both directions.

The light was
fading as we reached a Lebanese border village, where a casualty had
just arrived by motorbike. There were three people on a tiny 50cc
machine: one driving, another behind with the injured man carried
horizontally in his arms, unconscious and bleeding. They laid him on the
floor in the back room of a farmhouse. A doctor bent over him to apply
fresh bandages. "I am just a GP," he told me. "This man needs a
surgeon." There were two bullet wounds. The doctor gave him a 50-50
chance of surviving, though even those odds were thought better than
what he would get in a government hospital, where security forces look
for wounded fighters.

A smuggler named Hassan had brought the
injured man in. He offered to take us over back over the border on his
motorbike, one at a time. We were still waiting for a bag of our
equipment so we refused, a decision that may have saved our lives.
Hassan waved and drove off up a dirt track leading into Syria. An hour
later, we heard long echoing bursts of automatic fire. Villagers
gathering around the back door of the farmhouse, swapping news. Hassan
had been captured by a Syrian patrol, one reported. No, said another, he
had been captured but he had escaped. He had been shot, said a third.
We still did not know what had happened, except that Hassan had not come
back by the time another group of smugglers came to fetch us, three
hours later.

We took a different route than Hassan's and went
on foot. It was around midnight and chilly when we set off, six men,
each carrying a sack of ammunition and two or three Kalashnikovs for
the fighters inside. They spoke in tense whispers as we crept through
apricot orchards and across fields. There were mines, they said, and the
Syrian Army had recently reinforced the area. "Now you have to tip toe,
like a ballet dancer," said one of the smugglers under his breath as we
prepared to cross the heavily patrolled asphalt road that marked the
border. This time, there were no soldiers. We made it over and, a
hundred yards further on, found a small truck waiting for us. Everyone
piled in and we were taken to the first of many safe houses.

Sitting
cross-legged on the floor, we chatted over a late supper of flat bread,
cheese, and tiny glasses of hot, sweet tea. One of the men was Khoda, a
Syrian house painter who had been working in Lebanon before he gave up
his job to do this. "In Egypt, the revolution started because of poverty
and hunger," he said. "In Libya it started because of misuse of power.
In Syria, the main purpose of the revolution is to gain back our dignity
and our honour."

"Dignity" was a word I heard a great deal from
Syrians explaining the revolution. Here, he was talking about Dera'a,
the small southern town where the uprising had begun. In March, 15
school children were arrested for spraying anti-regime graffiti on a
wall. Desperate families went to the local security headquarters.
According to the widely circulated stories, the officer told them to
forget about their children and that his men would rape the mothers to
give them more. Two weeks later, the children were released. Some had
had their fingernails pulled out. Neither the injuries, nor the insult,
were forgotten.

Khoda continued, "Syrians are immigrants in
Lebanon, or Jordan, or Libya, because they don't feel their humanity in
Syria and they go to search of it elsewhere. The minute you step over
the border into Syria, you feel you have lost your humanity again
because of this regime."

The next morning, Hassan showed up at
the safe house, alive and wearing a triumphant grin. He had been
arrested by a Syrian Army patrol, he said, and had pled with the captain
to release him, pointing out that he was after all only carrying
medicines. He offered to pay a bribe, a common practice along the
border, which is frequently traversed by smugglers. The captain said he
would like to help but that military intelligence were already on their
way. Some soldiers took Hassan outside to a flatbed truck and were about
to throw him in when he told his captor, an Alawite: "My family and my
tribe know where you live. If I die here tonight, they will slaughter
your whole village." He ran, pursued by the bullets we could hear a
couple of miles away.

One question -- who is Alawite and who is
Sunni? -- was in the background for every moment of my time in Syria,
surfacing again and again in the conversations we had with fighters,
activists, and local people. [ At the next safe house, I met Haydi
Abdullah, who had been a nurse at the military hospital in Latakia
before fleeing to join the opposition. After the protests started, he
told me, any medical staff whose loyalty was not believed to be 100
percent were sacked. In practice, Sunni doctors and nurses were replaced
with Alawites, who were thought more loyal to the Alawite-led
government. "All the hospitals now have turned into huge military posts,
full of security men," he said. Injured demonstrators "would receive
all kinds of insults from the nurses and doctors: 'Bastard. Son of a
bitch. Whore. Son of a dog. You spy, you agent of Israel.'" Haydi said
he had seen four patients, injured protestors, murdered in the hospital.
One man was brought in with a chest injury. "He would have survived but
they [the doctors and nurses] beat him and stabbed him with needles. If
my face had shown even a sign that I was upset, I would have been sent
to jail."

"The medical staff doing this were not just Alawites.
They were Sunnis, too," Haydi said, though he accused the regime of
encouraging sectarian hatred and fear to shore up their Alawite base, a
common perception among activists. But, as his account showed, the
regime still has support outside the Alawite communities, including
among the Sunni majority. That may be part of why it has survived almost
a year of challenges to its authority on the streets. The opposition,
for its part, includes some prominent Alawite and Christian
participants. Syria has not yet completely divided along sectarian fault
lines, though that is what many fear.

"Where are the millions? Where, where are the Arab
people? Where, where is the no-fly zone?

Many
Syrians are retreating into their own communities. During our short
stay, as we were passed along a chain of activist groups, we met only
Sunnis. We were heading for Homs, now the main center of opposition to
the regime, but a divided city where sectarian tensions are probably the
most acute in Syria. As we entered the city, Free Army supporters
helped us to slip past a military observation post on foot, warning that
if the soldiers spotted us, they would shoot. Our final destination was
the Sunni quarter, Bab Amr. The place felt as if it was under siege.
Armored vehicles sat on the major road junctions. As we drove within
sight of a checkpoint, soldiers fired a burst of shots over our heads.
We fled, but, half an hour later, a teenage boy was brought past us from
the same place, raw cartilage in his knee exposed by a bullet wound.
While we were there, a six-year-old boy was killed while playing on his
front doorstep, shot by a sniper, locals said.

Bab Amr was run
by Abu Mohammed. Tough, squat, shaven-headed, tracksuit-wearing, he
would no doubt suit the regime's propaganda, which paints the democracy
movement as the voice of a rough Sunni underclass.Abu Mohammed had two
degrees, one in economics and one in Arabic literature. The good jobs
were reserved for the Alawites, he said, so he had become a tobacco
smuggler, a trade that required having a few guns around. He brought out
those weapons in April, when the regime started shooting unarmed
demonstrators in Homs.

"There were the regular security forces
and some intelligence officers but then buses came from Air Force
Intelligence," he remembered. "They had black masks on their faces. As
soon as the buses stopped, they got out and started shooting. There
wasn't a single shot in the air. There were six martyrs and 20 wounded
in two minutes." He brought his Kalashnikov to the next demonstration.
He was the only one.Soon, though, there were others.

We were
talking in his sitting room, a brand new M-16 with a telescopic sight
propped up in the corner. "You can't buy a bag of flour unless you are a
partner with someone in Assad's family or entourage," he said,
explaining his anger with the Assad regime. "They have become so greedy
they want a slice of every kind of business, small as well as big. They
are not just stealing the natural resources like oil and gas -- OK, we
can put up with that -- they are stealing from our businesses as well.
That is unacceptable." He went on, "At least Hafez [al-Assad, the
previous president] had the sense to give a few jobs to the Sunnis."
That has changed. "The regime is 100 percent sectarian now. They only
recruit Alawites. The Sunnis are marginalized."

Abu
Mohammed described worsening sectarian violence in Homs (though of
course he spoke from a Sunni perspective). Alawites were setting up
their own unofficial checkpoints to kidnap Sunnis, whether they were
known government allies or not. "Later we find their bodies dumped on
the side of the road." A Shiite village was stopping buses, checking
IDs, and shooting Sunnis. (Alawites are a sect of Shiism.) A girl had
been raped and beheaded, the purported work of the Shabihah, or
"ghosts," a pro-government militia that recruis mainly among Alawites.
Abu Mohammed blamed the regime for all this. A man sitting next to
him chimed in, "These Christians," he said, "don't support the protests.
They are cowards. They are pigs. They won't even give us a liter of
diesel."

"No," said Abu Mohammed, "there are Christians who
support the revolution." He named a Christian village nearby that he
said had helped people in Bab Amr.

"If they are Alawite, don't hesitate."

Abu
Mohammed did not believe there would be a bloody and prolonged civil
war in Syria; the Alawites were too small a minority, 8 percent by his
estimate (10 to 12 percent is more commonly cited). Sunnis would leave
their government jobs in protest, he predicted, and "once they [in the
regime] find themselves alone they will not fight us." But he said the
regime would only give up power if forced. "The regime is dying. It is
in the final stages," he said, citing the defections from the security
forces to the Free Army. He said there were about 500 fighters in Bab
Amr now, many former soldiers.

It was after 11pm. Tracer fire
was arcing back and forth over the darkened streets of Bab Amr. A
defection, we later learned, was taking place: soldiers were running
away from their base, dodging shots from those remaining behind and
returning fire as they ran. Five men arrived at our hideout, exhausted
but elated, the newest recruits to the Free Army. People came out of
their houses to embrace them. A sixth man had not made it out -- they
carried his Kalashnikov. They had decided to run after being ordered to
shoot on unarmed demonstrators. "These are our people," said one of the
soldiers, referring, I suspect, to Sunnis rather than Syrians in
general.

It is surprising that the Syrian Army, overwhelmingly
Sunni though largely run by Alawite officers, has held together as long
as it has. Although small in number, there has been a steady stream of
defections. A whole unit, a battalion, or a brigade changing sides could
be decisive. Until that day comes, however, the official policy of the
Free Army is to merely protect the street demonstrators, not to go on
the offensive.

The strategy to overthrow the regime remains
focused on street protest. Demonstrators continue to take to the
streets, unarmed and often facing armored vehicles with nothing more
than placards, flags, and shouts for freedom. The United Nations
estimates that more than 5,000 people have been killed so far. In Bab
Amr, protests are not mostly at night and mostly in side streets, to
screen demonstrators from snipers. The energy has not flagged. At one of
the nightly gatherings we attended, people banged drums, yelling
slogans as if it was their first time out on the streets.

"From
Bab Amr. Oh Assad. From Bab Amr. Oh Assad. Victory from God. We are
victorious," they chanted."Where are the millions? Where, where are the
Arab people? Where, where is the no-fly zone?"

"This is Bab-Amro here. Long live Dera'a. Death over humiliation. Freedom forever over your will, oh Assad."

Mentions
of NATO, and alternatively subtle or overt calls for an intervention
like that in Libya against Muammar Qaddafi, are common.

"Bab Amr
will only be free with missiles," they chanted. "The people want a no
fly zone. The people want a no-fly zone. We want an international
protection. We want an international protection."

They are not
going to get it. Syria is not Libya; it has been called the "Arab
Yugoslavia." It is too big, too complicated, with too many combustible
neighbors. For the time being, much as Western countries would wish
Assad gone, the Syrian people appear to be on their own.

The
conflict is escalating. Late at night, on the way out of Syria, we
joined about a dozen Free Army fighters as they debated whether to
attack an army checkpoint. It was clear these men did not answer to any
higher command authority. This was a question to be settled among
themselves. They sat on the floor, automatic weapons leaning against the
wall. "The Alawites never man the checkpoints. They always send our
people [Sunnis] to do that. They want to get them killed," insisted one
of the men.

"No, we don't want to kill those guys, they are Sunnis, our
relatives," said another. A third suggested, "We can always shoot at
them but not kill them, just to injure them." The discussion went round
and round. Some thought that only security targets -- the mukhabarat, or
secret police -- should be attacked. Others said that even if the
soldiers were Sunnis, they had had nine months to defect, and could now
expect to be targeted.

Finally, they decided to hit the building near the checkpoint as this,
it was thought, was where the Alawite soldiers would be sleeping. "If
they are Alawite, don't hesitate," said one of the fighters. "If you
want to do the right thing, we shoot an RPG at the building. We shoot it
through the window and we kill all of them. If any come out, we start
shooting."

Another man objected. "Save those RPGs. Each one of us
is working and paying for his own. It's not cheap, about $500 each.
Really we have to be careful and not waste our ammunition."

The
conversation was interrupted by a mobile phone, the ringtone a lyrical
chant of "Dear God, promise us victory." That phrase is sometimes
associated with ultra-conservative Salafi Islam; it was not uncommon to
hear them intoned over videos of suicide bombings in Iraq. After the
ringing was stopped, they left to carry out the attack.RPGs exploded
in the dark against the side of the building next to the checkpoint, a
flare in the night. There was heavy machine gun fire, incoming and
outgoing. "Oh God, you are the only one we can rely on," one of the
fighters said, over and over, showers of plaster came down where bullets
were hitting the wall behind us.

The
skirmish died down after an hour of so. None of the opposition fighters
had been killed. Their attack, they said, had killed two of the
government soldiers and wounded two more. "Thanks God, we are
victorious," one of the fighters declared.

A few weeks later, I
was in a Gulf capital discussing Syria's future with a man who has been
at the heart of the Assad regime -- under both father and son -- for
decades. A maid brought tea and pistachio biscuits. He was afraid for
his family still in Syria, he said, so asked to remain anonymous. He
described how Bashar al-Assad had, on taking power, been transformed
from an introverted and almost shy character into someone he no longer
recognised today in the heat of the crisis. "Maybe he is taking
medicines. While he was talking in the parliament, he was laughing,
while blood was running in the streets," said the man, shaking his head,
a reference to Assad's bizarre March 30 speech to the Syrian
legislature.

The man's judgement was that not one single Cabinet
minister truly supported the president but, like him, were still too
afraid to speak out. Even the most hard line Alawites are calculating
what a post-Assad Syria would look like, he suggested. Perhaps the plan
was to retreat into the Alawite heartland in the north west, he went on,
a speculation I had heard from activists but never from someone who had
been so close to the center of power. He feared that a civil war was
coming, he said, and the longer Assad took to leave, the more likely it
would be. I thought of Qutaiby buying silencers, Hassan and his warning,
and it was hard to disagree. For the past year, there has been
stalemate. If the revolutionaries do not succeed, the prospect is of
all-out civil war, something much worse than the regime they have been
fighting.